hollow. We found a watch, a hunting knife, several ski-sticks, two
single-barrelled Remingtons, a leather vest and a tube containing some
kind of ointment. We found the rotted remains of a bag containing
photographic film. And finally, in the lowest part of the hollow, we
found a tent, and under that tent, its edges still held down by drift logs
and whalebone to prevent it being blown away in a gale—under this
tent, which we had to hack out of the ice with axes, we found him whom
we were looking for...
It was still possible to guess in what attitude he had died-his right arm
flung out, body stretched out as if listening to something. He lay on his
face, and the satchel in which we found his farewell letters was under his
chest. Obviously, he had hoped that the letters would be better
preserved under cover of his body.
"4. There could have been no hope for our ever seeing him alive. But
until the word Death had been pronounced, until I had seen it with my
own eyes, this childish thought had still lingered in my heart. Now it
was gone, but in its stead another light burned up brightly—the thought
that it was not for nothing, not in vain, that I had been seeking him, that
for him there would be no death. An hour ago the steamer came
alongside the electric lighthouse and the sailors, with heads bared,
carried the coffin aboard covered with the tattered remains of the tent.
A salute was fired and the ship flew its flag at half-mast. Alone, I
wandered around the deserted camp of the St. Maria and here I am,
writing to you, my own, dear Katya. How I wish I were with you at this
moment! It will soon be thirty years since that brave struggle for life
ended, but I know that for you he died only today. I am writing to you
from the front, as it were, telling you about your father and friend, who
had fallen in battle. Sorrow and pride for him fill my soul, which is
stirred to its depths by this spectacle of immortality..."
334
CHAPTER TWO
THE UNBELIEVABLE
"How I wish I were with you at this moment"—I read and reread these
words, and they seemed to me so cold and empty, as if I were in a cold,
empty room, addressing my own reflection. It was Katya I needed, and
not this diary—the living, bright, sweet Katya, who believed in me and
loved me. Once, shaken by the fact that she had turned her back on me
at her mother's funeral, I had dreamt of coming to her, like the Gadfly,
throwing at her feet the evidence that proved me to have been right.
Afterwards the whole world had learnt of her father through me and he
had become a national hero. But for Katya he remained her father-who,
if not she, was to be the first to learn that I had found him? Who, if not
she, had told me how wonderful everything would be if the fairy-tales
we believed in still came true on earth? Amid the cares, labours and
perturbations of the war I had found him. Not a boy, fascinated by a
dim, glamorous vision of the Arctic which illumined his mute, half-
conscious world, not a youth striving with youth's stubbornness to have
his own way-no, it was as a mature man, who had experienced
everything, that I stood confronting a discovery destined to become part
of the history of Russian science. I was proud and happy. But a surge of
bitterness rose up inside me at the thought that it could all have been
different.
I did not get back to my regiment until the end of January, and the
very next day I was summoned to Polarnoye to report to the commander
of the Northern Fleet.
Our launch entered the bay, and the town unfolded to my gaze, all
white, pink and snowy. It stood on the steep, grey hillside as if on a
pedestal of beautiful granite rocks. White little houses with porch steps
running out in different directions were arranged in terraces, while
along the bay front, forming a semi-circle, stood big stone houses. In
fact, as I found out afterwards, they were called "compass houses", as
though a gigantic compass had described this semi-circle over
Catherine's Bay.
I climbed the flight of steps which passed under an arch thrown
between these houses and saw the whole bay from shore to shore. The
inexplicable agitation under which I had been labouring all that
morning gripped me anew with extraordinary farce. The bay was dark
green and impenetrable, with only a faint glimmer shed by the sky.
There was something very remote, southern, reminiscent of a highland
lake in the Caucasus, about this land-locked bay-except that on the far
side a line of low hills, covered with snow, ran out into the distance with
low trees making here and there a delicate black tracery against their
dazzling background.
I do not believe in intuition, but that was the word that sprung to my
mind as, stirred by the beauty of Polarnoye and Catherine's Bay, I stood
by the compass houses. It was as if the town that appeared before me
were my home, which until then I had only seen in dreams and sought
in vain for so many long years. I found myself thinking with a thrill of
335
excitement that something was bound to happen here, something good
for me, perhaps the best thing to happen to me in all my life.
There was nobody at HQ yet. I had come before office hours. The
night-duty officer said that, as far as he knew, I had been ordered to
report at 10 p.m., whereas it was now only seven-thirty.
I went to look up the doctor-not at the hospital, but in his rooms.
Of course, he lived in one of those white little houses arranged in
terraces on the hillside. They had looked much prettier from the sea.
Here was Row One, but I needed Row Five, House No. 7.
Like the Nentsi, I walked along thinking all but aloud of what I was
seeing. A group of Englishmen overtook me. They wore funny winter
caps resembling those our old Russian coachmen used to wear and long,
khaki robe-like affairs and it set me thinking how little they knew our
Russian winters. A boy in a white fluffy fur coat walked along, grave and
chubby, with a toy spade over his shoulder. A be-whiskered sailor
caught him up and carried him on a few steps, and it set me thinking
that there were probably very few children in Polarnoye.
House No. 7, Row 5, differed in no way from any of its neighbours on
the right or left, except perhaps that its front steps were barely visible
under a coating of slippery ice. I took them at a run and collided with
some naval men, who came out onto the porch at that moment. One of
them slid carefully down the steps, remarking that "inability to take
one's bearings in a Polar-night situation points to a deficiency of
vitamins in the body". They were doctors. This was Ivan Ivanovich's
home all right.
I went into the hall, pushed one door, then another. Both rooms were
empty, smelt of tobacco, had unmade beds in them and things lay
scattered about, masculine-like. There was something hospitable about
those rooms, as if their occupants have purposely left the doors open.
"Anybody here?"
There was no need to ask. I went out into the street again.
A woman with her skirt hitched up was rubbing her bare feet with